A View from the Other Side

Interesting blog post about something happening in America, Land of the Free:

I know a young man who is heartbroken and devastated because his fiancée’s Catholic mother informed her daughter she would absolutely refuse to attend their wedding unless the couple agreed to use contraception. “I raised an intelligent, independent daughter,” this woman insisted, “smart enough to get into [a prominent Ivy League School]. That daughter should be smart enough not to become enslaved to the rules of a bunch of old celibate white guys wearing dresses in Rome.”

But here’s my question: Where’s the much-vaunted “tolerance”? Who’s forcing what on whom? Is it really the Catholic priests in Rome who are “policing” this young woman’s bedroom, or is it her mother? Who is the party willing to engage in a dialogue: the Magisterium whose members have written literally hundreds of well-reasoned pages on the topic; or the mother who in no uncertain terms condemns her daughter for being “stupid” for even thinking about not contracepting?

Who exactly in these circumstances is really on the side of women’s freedom? Who is forcing women to do what they want them to do, and who is trying to convince women to make educated and responsible choices about their own fertility? Is the mother who refuses to go to her daughter’s wedding unless she promises to contracept allowing her daughter to make her own educated and responsible choice about her own fertility? Or is she choosing for her daughter from a position of alleged superiority?